Related papers: On the Limits of Consensus under Dynamic Availabil…
Blockchains are being positioned as the "technology of trust" that can be used to mediate transactions between non-trusting parties without the need for a central authority. They support transaction types that are native to the blockchain…
We propose LazyLedger, a design for distributed ledgers where the blockchain is optimised for solely ordering and guaranteeing the availability of transaction data. Responsibility for executing and validating transactions is shifted to only…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
We study the consensus problem in a synchronous distributed system of $n$ nodes under an adaptive adversary that has a slightly outdated view of the system and can block all incoming and outgoing communication of a constant fraction of the…
The specification of state machine replication (SMR) has no requirement on the final total order of commands. In blockchains based on SMR, however, order matters, since different orders could provide their clients with different financial…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
Initiated from Nakamoto's Bitcoin system, blockchain technology has demonstrated great capability of building secure consensus among decentralized parties at Internet-scale, i.e., without relying on any centralized trusted party. Nowadays,…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
Blockchain protocols come with a variety of security guarantees. For example, BFT-inspired protocols such as Algorand tend to be secure in the partially synchronous setting, while longest chain protocols like Bitcoin will normally require…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in…
This paper introduces Nemo-Nemo, a practical crash-fault tolerant (CFT) consensus protocol designed to outperform existing protocols in wide-area networks by bridging design principles from the CFT and Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) worlds.…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
Agreement among a set of processes and in the presence of partial failures is one of the fundamental problems of distributed systems. In the most general case, many decisions must be agreed upon over the lifetime of a system with…
A decentralized blockchain is a distributed ledger that is often used as a platform for exchanging goods and services. This ledger is maintained by a network of nodes that obeys a set of rules, called a consensus protocol, which helps to…
Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that…
This work addresses the inherent issues of high latency in blockchains and low scalability in traditional consensus protocols. We present pod, a novel notion of consensus whose first priority is to achieve the physically-optimal latency of…
The increasing application and deployment of blockchain in various services necessitates the assurance of the effectiveness of PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus service. However, the performance of PBFT consensus service…
Blockchain design involves many tradeoffs, and much debate has focused on tradeoffs related to scaling parameters such as blocksize. To address some of the confusion around this subject, we present a probability proof of the DCS Triangle.…